The Black Opera (86 page)

White ash, swirling around the top of the amphitheatre. Swirling faster. Ash and superheated gas rose as if it were a blinding snowstorm.

Lightning cracked through the Anfiteatro Grande, turning the clouds white like sunrise.

A hot wind blew down around him, tightening around his forehead like an iron band, and centring in his right eye with an abrupt burst of hemicrania.

One hand over his eye, sheltering it even from this light, Conrad watched the ash whip in wind-devils and tornadoes, circling lower, until he felt nauseous and dizzy trying to follow it.

Cumulus clouds of ash and sulphur and fire flowed up and over the broken lip of the
Anfiteatro
walls, rolling further in, and further down towards the arena…

Conrad barely noticed the musicians of the Prince's Men, on the far side of the auditorium, surging down to the bottom of the steps.

The white gases flowed in through every arched entrance, at every level of the Flavian Amphitheatre except the lowest. Any remnant of grass or scrub left after the Prince's Men scraped the tiers clean now crisped up into ash. Bricks cracked under intense heat.

Run!
Conrad urged himself.

His rational mind threw back the counter:
Where?

Nora didn't run. She held her arms out, as if she welcomed the flow of magmitic heat; as if she thought she could not be harmed by it.

A blast of air hit Conrad in the face, so sharply that he threw up both hands against it, uncovering his throbbing eye. Anticipation of scalding heat tensed his spine and shoulders—

The air felt cold.

No, not just cold
, Conrad thought wonderingly.

Frozen
.

It blew in his face for as long as a man might count five. A wind, cold as that in the passes over the Alps, chilled his outstretched fingers—and was gone. The air in the amphitheatre was only the warmth of early spring.

“I don't understand,” he breathed, barely conscious he spoke aloud.

A few yards away, Roberto Capiraso made an incoherent sound, and turned his head frantically, staring around the stone bowl of the
Anfiteatro Flavio
.

The great rolling clouds flowed in—and seemed somehow to
clot
.

Conrad frowned.

Clumps and clusters of ash grew smaller and more dense. Separating out, coalescing out of the storm. Smaller still: as if they were no more than the height of a man—

Vapour and dust flowed into the amphitheatre, last remnant of the pyroclastic surges that must have devastated Naples.

Out of it, now—created of its substance—onto brickwork that cracked as it cooled—the dead came walking.

They took up ten or twenty rows of the upper seating easily, overflowing further down every moment.

Lightning dazzled from the volcano's towering pillar of cloud. Seen by violent splashes of light, Conrad made out first one man, then a woman, then three children running, another man… a dozen men… a hundred…

Thousands
, Conrad mutely thought.

Filling the amphitheatre. Thousands of people
.

Precipitating out of the volcanic ash that has taken Naples.

Sweat rolled down his temples, collecting coldly between his shoulder-blades.

“Corrado! There—” Tullio's hand caught at his.

Grey gasses crept to the lowest of the tiers, close by. A figure emerged from the swirl of the pyroclastic cloud, all white and ash-colours—but solid; no ghost or apparition.

He brushed himself off as he emerged, and ended still dusty with ash, but recognisably in the colours of human flesh. The man wore a smart police uniform with cape and gloves; his dead face white and his dead eyes lively with amusement.

“Luigi?”

It was impossible to say more. Conrad's throat closed up with immediate overwhelming grief.

Luigi Esposito seated himself on the lowest tier, one knee crossed casually over the other, as if he were still a living man. He removed his hat with its cockade and carefully brushed it, dust-coloured as it was.

Conrad could not see what had killed him.

Heat, pressure, lava, gas—it could be anything…

Realisation hit him.

Every man, woman, or child that walks out of the ash-cloud has Returned Dead from Naples.

They walk so close together that their shoulders rub. Thousands—and still there seems no end of them.

“The first miracle was clear air.” Conrad heard Tullio grunt assent. “And the second, freedom from any weapon that could strike them from a distance.”

“Suppose this is the third, padrone.”

“Part of it,” Conrad muttered.

There's whatever she plans to do at the last
.

Conrad turned away from his dead friend Luigi and stared across the broken earth, open pits, and sprawled hostages on the arena floor. The earth was chill underfoot. A last wisp of cloud covered him, briefly; he had to cover his mouth, and hack a cough that felt like cold nails in his chest, but the ash whirled and lifted, and took the feeling of suffocation with it.

The Returned Dead, uncovered by the dissipating surge, occupied all the upper seats of the amphitheatre, and considerably further down the rows nearer to Leonora and her minimal scenery and other singers. In a theatre that is known to have seated forty thousand in its heyday, they make it a quarter or even a third full.

Ferdinand's mouth set in one hard line.
“My
people!”

Conrad wished he was close enough to see Nora's face clearly.

Judging by how she stalked and gestured, driving her musicians back into place, there was nothing left now of the Contessa, or of the ferocious singer of Venezia. If she distantly seemed brought down to skin and bone, what was left was the stubborn, determined, charity-child, fire in her eyes to let her have her ambition's way with the world.

I wish I could get close enough to speak to her without shouting. Ask why she did this—because she
has
done this
—

“They're her audience,” Conrad said aloud.

Roberto Capiraso frowned. “They needed no audience in Indonesia.”

“Then why else are they here?”

Roberto shook his head. It was obvious he'd been told nothing about it.

Economically making use of the people who formed her “blood sacrifice,” so that she can get emotional reactions to the black opera
—

If that's so, why didn't she do it before now?

If Conrad walks across the arena and (supposing he survives) shouts and asks her what she plans to do—he knows she'll tell him what
il Principe
have always claimed.
Change the Mind of God
.

Is it for this she's calling the recently dead of Naples back—?

The ash-clouds flowed on down onto the middle rows of seating, and stopped. Luigi remained an isolated figure.

Conrad took in, at a glance, the appallingly small number of men on their side. Ferdinand's riflemen—those who were not prisoners—sprawled along the lower tiers, gabbling like old gossips as they stared up at the Returned Dead of Naples. That and the hostages formed any audience sympathetic to
L'Altezza azteca
.

Conrad tried not to despair at the pitifully small number of singers and musicians.
It may not matter.

Roberto made some urgent explanation and left the King's side; Paolo, violin in hand, strode with him back to their singers. Conrad followed. Sandrine and Spinelli stood hand in hand. Velluti absently dusted at his white robes, all his covert attention on Leonora, seventy yards away.

“Corrado?” Brigida Lorenzani looked up from pinning a length of borrowed green cloth around her hips—torn from JohnJack's robe, by the colour. It gave her an impromptu skirt under her shining breastplate. “What do we do?
Is
there anything we can do?”

“Pick up from where we broke off,” JohnJack said, with a wary glance down the arena. “Corrado—we're
stronger
if we have her musicians too. If she can stop them panicking.” His dusty round face moved into a wry grin. “If
her
people are
having hysterics, what are we supposed to do?”

Conrad caught Paolo's eye. She put her violin to her shoulder, with an encouraging word to Roberto Conte di Argente, and joined the oboist and flautist.

Conrad halted beside the Count, leaning to look at the score one of the King's aides held.

Roberto gave an odd smile. “You trust me, then? Not to sabotage as I conduct?”

“I don't think you ever cared about the Prince's Men. You played spy for them, and saboteur, but that was all for Nora. Now she's—” Conrad spoke with all the control he could muster. He couldn't bring himself to use the word
betrayed
. “—Lost your trust, you'll do anything to see
Reconquista
fail. Tell me I'm wrong.”

The Count snorted in sour amusement.

“Besides,” Conrad finished, “guns have to start working again
some
time. And then Tullio Rossi can shoot you dead.”

“Not even killed by a gentleman. That will
sting
.”

Despite the desperate strangeness of the situation, Conrad couldn't help a snort of amusement.

He glanced over his shoulder, and saw the Prince's Men still stumbling about. Instinct moved him to turn, where he stood beside Roberto, and address the singers and musicians.

“I think it's simple.” Conrad spoke loud enough for the acoustics of the auditorium to let him be heard. “The Prince's Men have brought an audience. Clearly, they think the Returned Dead are
theirs
. I say—I say we have to
win
their audience.”

Light and shadow danced on the rough earth: the shadows of the ejection plume, and its lightnings. Distance dulled its fierceness.

We're not so far from Misenum
, Conrad realised,
where Pliny saw the eruption merely as an umbrella-tree of smoke pouring up into the sky
.

Pliny didn't have to contend with what's happening outside at this moment.

And even so, Pliny the Elder went in ships to take off refugees, and met his death on those beaches.

Conrad gathered his thoughts and his resolution. He pushed the pain in his skull as much into the background as he could. He met their eyes as he looked along the row of them, sitting on the first step: JohnJack, Sandrine, Brigida, Velluti. Paolo's wide excited eyes, and the different but equally grave frowns of King Ferdinand and il Superbo.

“You have to trust the opera.”

He began pacing again, not able to contain his energy.

“Not
The Aztec Princess
, in particular. I mean: trust
opera
. Trust bel canto. There must be no jealousy, no aggression and back-biting, no upstaging; nothing
that make them call us
la feccia teatrale. Unselfish
singing.”

One hand went over his eye to prevent the light falling in it, he was aware he must look a fool, but he went on without regard for that.

“No singer ever made a success of an aria on their own! Not even a solo. If there's no chorus involved, there's still the orchestra. I know what tricks people have in duets and trios and choruses, singing over top of one another, showing off coloratura where the score doesn't call for it—the list is endless.”

A low rumble rolled up from the west, shivering through the earth—originating, not from Vesuvius, but from the Campi Flegrei.

“I've sat in the Pit and listened to singers
support
each other. You've read the score: you know that if you sing to make your partner look good, they'll return the favour further on. You become part of something stronger—” Conrad fought for words, and gave Ferdinand a nod of acknowledgement. “—Something more intense… You trust bel canto itself—”

A long-drawn chord launched on the air.

Conrad halted, swinging round and staring down the long axis of the amphitheatre. The singers of
il Principe
clustered in a ruck, on the edge of the stage farthest from the Returned Dead. A low chorus began.